A good Shopify web developer can build you a fantastic Shopify website. However, creating a well-run, well-optimized, well-made Shopify website is not as easy as it first seems. The Shopify system is made so that the less you do, the better your website is.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the brand behind Shopify realized that if they do most of the hard work and take most of the work out of your hands, then your website will look passable (if not good). The problem with Shopify developers is that they fiddle too much. They customize too much, and they change too much so that your website goes from simplistically brilliant to a convoluted mess. That is why you need to beware of some of the developer mistakes mentioned in this article.
Confusing Over-Decoration With Good Design
The fact is that you can run a website with just a single white page with a few functions on top of it. Look at the Amazon website, it is a simple list of items and product pages. It doesn’t have fancy graphics, elaborate popups, or funky transitions. Yet, some developers feel like they are giving better value for money if they add more when what they are really doing is making your website less user-friendly.
Trying to “Optimize” for SEO
Modern SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about being user-friendly. It is more of a search experience optimization rather than pandering to the search engines. Yet, some web developers still hail at that altar of old-fashioned SEO and it is wildly inappropriate for modern websites.
Make no mistake, there are plenty of things a developer can do to make your website more search engine friendly: things such as streamlining the code, improving loading speeds, making content more accessible to search engines. However, the old-fashioned methods for SEO can be damaging to your website if they are baked into the design.
Copying Code From Other Websites
One way that poor-quality developers cut corners is to copy and paste the code from other websites into yours. It is like giving a car a new spray job and new plates, but it is essentially the same car underneath.
In most cases, the developer simply transfers security risks over to other websites. In even more cases, the code is so disconnected from the other code that is written, that it becomes unclean and not as streamlined or concise as it should be. This alone can damage your search engine friendliness, and it makes it more difficult for later developers to make bug-free alterations to your website.
Outsourcing The Job to Others
This is such a common problem and yet goes largely unaddressed because it is difficult to prove. What a poor quality developer does is works on the easy stuff on your website but farm out the trickier tasks to other people. Typically they are Chinese or Middle Eastern coders who can work for very low pay rates. This sort of thing only happens with very poor quality designers, so you need to work hard to find a good and reliable Shopify developer.
If you opt for the cheapest possible developer, then sometimes the code comes back with security flaws, and in most cases, it comes back poorly optimized simply because the low-paid coder has no reason to create perfect, streamlined, and well-working code. In the end, the Shopify web developer gets paid, you get a poor quality product, and it takes months before you realize just poorly your website was built. If you need a good, usable, and reliable website that was built by professionals, then get in touch with the team at Collective Fab Agency for a consultation.
